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Tag: Robert Farley

In the March/April issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Republican strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie opened an article titled “How to Beat Obama” with this paragraph:

In an American election focused on a lousy economy and high unemployment, conventional wisdom holds that foreign policy is one of Barack Obama’s few strong suits. But the president is strikingly vulnerable in this area. The Republican who leads the GOP ticket can attack him on what Obama mistakenly thinks is his major strength by translating the center-right critique of his foreign policy into campaign themes and action. Here’s how to beat him.

There are two basic themes here: 1) that the conventional wisdom that foreign policy isn’t a big issue in this election is wrong, and 2) that foreign policy can and should be a winning issue for the GOP candidate. They go on to outline how [Mitt Romney] should try to make foreign policy an issue. Then, oddly, the article circles back around to this paragraph:

Absent a major international crisis, this election will be largely about jobs, spending, health care, and energy. Voters do, however, want a president who leads on the world stage and a commander in chief who projects strength, not weakness.

Now one of Romney’s foreign policy advisers is going on offense, saying that Obama’s approach to strategy could be characterized as a game of “Mother, may I?”

So–should the GOP try to make foreign policy an issue or not? The idea that foreign policy can be a winning issue for Romney was interesting to me, and I criticized the Rove/Gillespie article here (with Rob Farley) and here in a podcast. So I was intrigued when Chris Wallace asked Gillespie on Fox News Sunday, “In one paragraph, two or three sentences, what’s the choice for voters?” Here’s Gillespie’s response:

The choice for voters is if we are going to have a dynamic pro-growth economy based on free enterprise, that creates jobs, that lifts people out of poverty, that provides upward mobility for someone like my father who was an immigrant, who came to this country and was able to become a small business owner, versus a government-centered society – one that requires, you know, to meet mandates and comply with regulations and fill out forms and seek waivers, and try to get your subsidies, where people in Washington, D.C. are making decisions about how people their spend money, as oppose to free enterprise and personal religious freedom and personal freedom that has made this country great and has helped to create more jobs than anything, any government we’ve ever seen.

Not a word about foreign policy. It will be interesting to see if Rove and Gillespie prevail on Romney and get him to try to make foreign policy an issue. Beyond inchoate laments about Obama not understanding American exceptionalism, not “leading” and nonspecific rhetoric like that, I’m betting they won’t.

Karl Rove’s and Ed Gillespie have written a piece arguing that the conventional wisdom is wrong because a) foreign policy can be made into a big issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, and b) Obama is vulnerable on the subject. I did not find the piece persuasive at all, and my disagreement with it has produced not just a podcast on the subject, but an appearance on bloggingheads. The University of Kentucky’s Robert Farley and I discuss a range of subjects, from the Rove/Gillespie piece, to burning Qurans in Afghanistan, to the future of U.S.-China relations. To give you a flavor, here’s a clip where I denounce the GOP foreign policy establishment:

For what it’s worth, I think the only way to solve the problem I identify above is a decades-long project to build a counter-counterestablishment of foreign policy thinkers who could staff the foreign policy wing of a notionally sensible GOP presidential candidate. I have not yet read this book, but in reading reviews of it, my understanding is that it does a good job describing how the neocons built their counterestablishment, which I think by now has essentially become the establishment. The neoconservative insurgency benefited from remarkable largesse from their funders, a large bench of aspiring policy professionals, and a sharp-elbowed ability to successfully fight within bureaucracies. If people wish to reverse the course of GOP foreign policy, I suspect a similar effort will be needed on the part of realists. (We’re working on it. Happy to talk to any Democrats, too.)

For the entire bloggingheads video, go here. For my podcast on the Rove/Gillespie piece, go here. For my prior denunciation of the Beltway foreign-policy establishment, here.